


Lions' Pride

by airdeari



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Gen, Questioning, Trans Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, Trans Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Transmasculine Ingrid Brandl Galatea, a smidgen of sylvix, cis sylvain. rip. hes gay tho, manuela's there for 2 seconds and guess what? shes trans, the faerghus four goes to pride
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:42:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25424086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airdeari/pseuds/airdeari
Summary: Sylvain leans on his toes and squints over the heads of the surrounding crowd. He taps Dimitri on the shoulder and yells in his ear to be heard: “Hey, are those just the ace flags, or are those nonbinary?”Dimitri shields the sun from his eyes with a hand—he’s going to be incredibly sunburnt later, with two white rectangles on his cheeks where Sylvain painted his trans and bi flags—and takes a look for himself. “Yes—those have yellow, not grey,” he shouts back.“I can’t tell what’s yellow and what’s not!” Sylvain says, thumbing his round, amber sunglasses that cast everything he sees in a golden light. “Ingrid, hey! Where’s Ingrid?!”[Day 6 of FE Trans Week: Pride & Found Family]
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Ingrid Brandl Galatea & Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 4
Kudos: 35
Collections: Fire Emblem Trans Week 2020!





	Lions' Pride

Manuela Casagrande’s float of pink, blue, and white is going by, with a live chamber orchestra of colorful musicians performing atop it to accompany her signature aria, when Sylvain leans on his toes and squints over the heads of the surrounding crowd. He taps Dimitri on the shoulder and yells in his ear to be heard: “Hey, are those just the ace flags, or are those nonbinary?”

Dimitri shields the sun from his eyes with a hand—he’s going to be incredibly sunburnt later, with two white rectangles on his cheeks where Sylvain painted his trans and bi flags—and takes a look for himself. “Yes—those have yellow, not grey,” he shouts back.

“I can’t tell what’s yellow and what’s not!” Sylvain says, thumbing his round, amber sunglasses that cast everything he sees in a golden light. “Ingrid, hey! Where’s Ingrid?!”

Ingrid is with Felix, closer to the front of the sidelines of the parade, both of them wrapped lengthwise under Felix’s trans flag cape to protect their bare shoulders from the sun. Ingrid perks their ears when they hear their name.

“Red alert!” Sylvain calls, trying to weave his way through the crowd towards them. “Nonbinary merch! Nine o’clock!”

They look at their own nine o’clock instead of Sylvain’s, so he points. They turn the right way, to the flurry of niche flags at the cart further down the block, and just stare.

Ingrid’s family was never well-off like the boys’ were. They’re working long hours and living frugal with their three best friends in one tiny townhouse, but they’ve got student loan debt looming over their head that none of the boys do. When they stare at the flags, it looks like numbers are crunching behind their eyes.

Dimitri, who not only doesn’t have student debt, but has an inheritance trust fund so massive that he wouldn’t have to work a day in his life if he didn’t have such an insatiable work ethic, immediately starts to shoulder his way towards the flag stand with a single-minded determination, one hand in his pocket for his wallet.

“No!” Ingrid shouts. “No, Dimitri, wait!”

Sylvain laughs, but Felix shrugs off his half of the cape to cup his leather-gloved hands (he, too, is going to end up with interesting sunburn patterns) around his mouth. He hollers over the crowd, “Dimitri, they’re _serious_ , get back here!”

Threats from Felix have always carried well and gotten Dimitri to stop in his tracks. After nearly a year on testosterone, his voice carries even farther, and sounds just as deadly as it was always supposed to. Dimitri freezes on a dime and turns back, squinting into the sun for Felix, then for Ingrid.

Ingrid looks like a deer in headlights. The trans flag hangs lopsided over their shoulders and they’re too stunned to adjust it. “I, uh,” they say, too quietly for anyone but Felix to hear, “I have something to—”

“What?!” says Sylvain.

They open their mouth again, then turn back to where Manuela is spiting nature by hitting a note that could shatter glass by making it weep. The crowd screams with delight. Ingrid points at the diva to convey, _wait until after she’s done._

Sylvain gives a thumbs up and waves Dimitri back to him. Felix shrugs himself back under the trans flag cape. Ingrid says something in his ear, and he nods.

When the cadence closes and applause drowns out the music, Felix and Ingrid pull back from their precious vantage point. “Ingrid has to pee,” Felix announces loudly, pulling out his phone. He still has an app to locate public gender-neutral bathrooms from his limbo period of not passing as male but not looking female enough to suffer the indignity of the women’s restroom.

“Wait, no,” Ingrid interrupts, pushing his hand down. “I…”

The rest is inaudible. The next float has a T-shirt cannon and the crowd is wailing for attention. Felix rolls his eyes. After a look around, Sylvain thumbs over his shoulder at an open space further down the side street on whose corner they stand to watch the parade. He grabs Dimitri’s and Felix’s wrists to take the whole crew there.

“What’s up, Ingy?” Sylvain asks when he can hear anything at all.

“Okay,” Ingrid says, their shoulders slumped, “I’m… I’m still thinking about this, but… I don’t know if I’m really all that nonbinary? I think I’m…”

A rolled-up T-shirt fires into the crowd about twenty feet away and the noise rises up too high to hear again. Felix has earplugs in, but he still wrinkles his nose at the unwelcome spike in volume.

“Maybe I’m, um, just a boy,” they squeak out. “I don’t know yet.”

“How do you want us to refer to you?” Dimitri asks with delight, placing his hand on their shoulder.

“I don’t know, I just—didn’t want you to buy a nonbinary flag if I wasn’t going to be nonbinary in the end,” Ingrid says, scratching their head. “I don’t know yet. It’s nothing, I just—”

Felix nudges them with an elbow to stop their rambling. “We can try out whatever pronouns or names you want without making it permanent,” he states firmly. “We’re all trans. And Sylvain can suffer.”

“Hey, I’m cool!” Sylvain protests. “I’m a cool cis. I can be cool about pronoun shit.”

“Ingrid, please let us know what _you_ are comfortable with,” Dimitri says earnestly, looking into their eyes.

“Um,” says Ingrid hesitantly, “I don’t know about a name yet, but maybe… he pronouns? Just to try it, if it’s not too…”

Felix takes a step away from Ingrid, again leaving the trans flag draped over Ingrid’s shoulders. He unfastens the _he/him/his_ pin from his tanktop and attaches it to Ingrid’s vest.

“There,” Felix says. “Sorry about the rainbow. Since you like girls.”

Ingrid stares at his new pin for a few beats. Then, he drapes the other half of the trans flag back over Felix’s shoulder and leans against him fondly.

“Wow,” Sylvain says. “I can’t believe I tried to pick up a group of ladies when I was a kid and they all turned out to be boys.”

“You turned out to be gay,” Felix retorted.

“Oh, trust me, I know.” He slings an arm over Felix’s shoulder and presses a kiss to his cheek.

“If you hit on me, I’ll kill you,” Ingrid says with a roll of his eyes. Then his eyes widen. “Fuck. Am I straight now? To be honest, that’s the only thing keeping me from being a boy, the fact that I’d have to say I’m _straight_. I’m not straight, right?”

“You can just say queer,” offers Felix nonchalantly, shoving Sylvain lovingly away from him.

“Haven’t you liked nonbinary people before?” Dimitri points out, passing Ingrid the handheld bi flag he has clenched between his fingers. “That could make you bisexual, if you’d like. I daresay I count at least two genders there.”

“Oh.” Ingrid blinks. “Yeah, that’s… that works. Wow.” He smirks, pressing the heel of his palm to his eyes one at a time. “I really am a boy, aren’t I?”

“Signs point to yes,” says Sylvain. He beckons Dimitri closer with a twitch of his fingers. “C’mon, Mitya, hup.”

“Hup?” repeats Ingrid warily when Dimitri nods at Sylvain with a smile, and each of them stand on one side of him.

They’re far from practiced, but they did this for Felix at last year’s parade when his height dysphoria was getting the better of him. Sylvain squats down in a bracing stance, while Dimitri sticks his arms under Ingrid’s and hoists him up off the ground. Felix lets the trans flag fly with Ingrid as Dimitri sets his kicking legs over Sylvain’s shoulder. Sylvain holds him securely by the thigh and the waist as he rises to stand, and Dimitri joins him underneath Ingrid’s other leg. He sits between their shoulders like a trans prince on their backs as they walk him back to see the parade.

“This guy is _trans_ as _fuck_ , baby!” Sylvain screams, and wolf-whistles after it with a pump of his free fist.

Ingrid goes redder in the face than the sunburn he’s going to have later, sitting in the direct sunlight on the shoulders of his incredibly tall friends, when the immediate crowd around them cheers in his honor at Sylvain’s announcement. But he waves his bi flag, and he touches his pronoun pin, and he feels right.


End file.
